At America’s Biggest Drone Show, the Focus Shifts Toward Domestic Skies

Clay Dillow
popsci.com
August 16, 2012

If you want to know what the future looks like, sit down and have a talk with Roy Minson. He’s the senior vice president and general manager of unmanned aircraft systems at Aerovironment, the manufacturer of nearly 85 percent of the Department of Defense’s unmanned aircraft fleet–not the Reapers and Predators that so often make headlines, but small aerial systems that make up the vast majority of the DoD’s 7,000 strong unmanned aircraft fleet. That is to say, business with the defense sector is good at Aerovironment. But today Minson is talking almost exclusively about non-military applications for the company’s hardware–him, and just about everybody else at the nation’s largest robotic systems show.

That’s partially because I’m peppering him with questions about civilian drone applications, but our conversation was bound to wander in this direction. The DoD certainly isn’t going anywhere, but defense spending cuts hang over this place like the sword of Damocles. The term for next year’s mandated defense spending cuts, “sequestration,” can be overheard around the exhibit hall here at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International’s annual North American trade show like some kind of new and derogatory slang.

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This article was posted: Thursday, August 16, 2012 at 6:40 pm

Tags: domestic news, domestic spying, drones, technology

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